Category Archives: story

(Inauguration speech of Franklin D. Roosevelt, president of USA during WWII)

A short story illustrating how fear cripples estimating and how empathy can come to the rescue.

The end of the year is only two sprints away. We are in a refinement session.
“So, would it still be feasible to deliver the ‘A+flow’ by the end of the year if we do it like this?” The PO asks the team. He is standing in front of a white board full of scribbles holding a marker in his hand. He just gave in on reducing the scope by slicing the functionality even further to a point where he will be having difficulties to explain the stakeholders what the value in this slice is. He even has difficulties explaining it to himself. Continue reading →

LeSS adoption prescribes one person in the role of Product Owner (PO). Not multiple people, not a committee, just one person. Companies have a hard time in accepting the idea that one person can do this complex task for the whole product. The product is too big and there are too many customers and stakeholders the PO needs to deal with. Companies refuse to redefine the PO role description and stick to having multiple Fake PO’s.Continue reading →

Tash Sultana is a 22 year old musician. She is cross functional, a multi-instrumentalist producing fully arranged tracks live on stage.

My team consists of Frontenders, Backenders, a Tech Writer and a QA. I am their scrum master. They are working as a team for a while already. It’s a team in the sense that they work on the same sprint backlog, but they are not the team as you would see described in the Agile books: They are not cross functional.

In the weekend, 7-8th of April, the Eastern European Agile convention took place. I was granted a 30-minute slot to speak on Saturday. This was the first time ever for me to speak at a convention. If you ever might consider to share your knowledge with a large group of people, read on.